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Merlin: Applescript

Vicky Stamatopoulou on 21. January 2010

Is there is a way to print all notes entered in the activity view of a Merlin project at once?

Yes of course. You can enable the display of the ‘notes’ column, disable all other columns,  hide the Gantt chart, adjust the column width and the row height accordingly and print.

Should you however happen to have, longer texts than the above setup could show completely, you may consider exporting the file as CSV and import into another application.

If export is much too inconvenient for you, you can use this AppleScript. It writes the project and activity notes into a text file, which you can later on open and edit with your favorite text application to complete your project management reports.

UPDATE: We have updated the script and enabled UTF-8 encoding for the created text file. This solves an issue with non English text (i.e. German texts with special characters) and wrong encoding of these texts, which will be now correctly transferred.

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Tags: Applescript, Merlin, Merlin 101

Merlin: Applescript toggle predecessor to successor

Vicky Stamatopoulou on 23. December 2009

The other day we received the following feature request in support:

I’d like to be able to switch a predecessor of an activity, to become a successor to that activity easily (like a menu choice or key stroke). My intent is to easily and quickly rearrange the time sequence of a small group of tasks.

Of course this wish got forwarded to the development, but why waiting when you can script Merlin?

We wrote a small Applescript handling a selected ‘finish to start’ linkage, which you can download here

You can select a ‘finish to start’ linkage line, start the script*, the script reads the predecessor and successor activities, removes the linkage and creates a new ‘finish to start’ linkage from former successor to former predecessor.

You may choose to sort by ‘expected start’ and freeze the sort order afterwards.

Enjoy or modify as you like, but please drop us a line, incase you find this helpful.

*) Read here how to put it in the SendToMenu directory to have it available under ‘File > Send To’ menu.

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Tags: Applescript, Merlin, Merlin 101

Merlin: AppleScript removing time constrains

Vicky Stamatopoulou on 11. December 2009

Have you ever entered actuals on an activity, assignment or milestone and noticed later on that you’d better not? Nothing easier than that. You select the activity, assignment or milestone and call Edit > Clear actual values.
Have you ever entered time constrains onto an activity, assignment or milestone and noticed later on that you’d better not? In this case, you should select the activity, assignment or milestone and remove manually all given earliest and latest dates for start and end.

If you would prefer to do these actions in one step for a selection containing activities, assignments or milestones, you may use the following AppleScript:

 (more...)

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Tags: Applescript, Merlin, Merlin 101

Merlin: Applescript splitting activity

Vicky Stamatopoulou on 4. November 2009

From time to time we get asked whether it is possible to split an activity in Merlin so it can be assigned to various resources at different time periods. Well, you will not find an explicit function doing so, but if you like, you may use the following AppleScript.

If you save it under ~/Library/Application Support/Merlin/SendToMenu it will always be accessible in Merlin over the File > Send To submenu.

tell application "Merlin"

	activate
	set userCanceled to false
	try
		-- get selection
		set myselection to selected object of ¬
		main window of document 1 as specifier
 (more...)

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Tags: Applescript, Merlin, Merlin 101

Merlin: AppleScript handling selected activities

Vicky Stamatopoulou on 22. October 2009

My favorite AppleScript ’template’ is the one we have created handling the currently selected activities. I use it from time to time, to reset the completeness percentage or define all selected activities as milestones.

You can also use it of course when wanting to forward activity information to other applications. In the Google user group of Merlin some samples are supplied for transferring To Dos to Things or TimeLine 3D.

But why making a short story long? Here you are. Enjoy my favorite AppleScript ‘template’:

tell application "Merlin"
	activate
	set myselection to selected object of main window of document 1 ¬
	as list
 (more...)

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Tags: Applescript, Merlin, Merlin 101

Merlin Applescript samples

Vicky Stamatopoulou on 18. September 2009

Setting a common information

Have you ever wanted to set a common information to your resources and wondered how to do so at once? Here is a small Applescript going through all project resources and toggling their ‘is private’ flag, but of course you can modify the sample to set another resource property if you need so…

set userCanceled to false
set dialogResult to display dialog "Shall I toggle the private flag of all resources?" ¬
        buttons {"Cancel", "OK"} ¬
	default button "OK" cancel button "Cancel"
if userCanceled then
	-- do nothing
else
	tell application "Merlin"
 (more...)

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Tags: Applescript, Merlin, Merlin 101